Visual Design articles

Great designers help teams and stakeholders make better decisions by using questions to identify opportunities, reveal underlying needs, and understand user context. James Dyson, having been inspired by a centrifuge used to separate paint particles from the air, came up with the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner in 1983 after famously going through 5,127 prototypes—the epitome of design thinking. He must have asked a lot of...

Dropbox has launched a controversial redesign of its brand identity, intended to help the SaaS standout in a market increasingly packed with pretenders to its throne. What they’ve unveiled seems certain to split opinion. On the one hand, the previous identity was business-like and sat comfortably alongside other tools in your GUI; on the other hand, that identity is tied to a business model that Dropbox, it seems, no longer aspires to:...

Sometimes your typeface needs to convey feeling as much as meaning, and for that function more designers are turning to dramatic typography. This type of typography is used for more than just legibility and readability (although that is still the primary purpose). Dramatic typography stands out. It reaches through the device screen, demands the viewer’s attention and directs it toward the message it’s delivering. It is an opportunity...

In the last few years, machine learning and artificial intelligence have been hitting the headlines often. The technology has been making progress in leaps and bounds. The physical limitations on computational requirements which once hindered the progress of AI are long-gone. Today, we’re actually pondering a different kind of dilemma: Will machine-learning actually surpass human intelligence in the next few years? Which “skilled”...

Yesterday YouTube launched a major UI revision to all its channels, from mobile, to games consoles. At the same time it’s made the first significant revision to its logo since its launch 12 years ago. The revised logo has been made live on mobile and desktop, and will begin to appear across all channels in the coming days. Some companies are for ever launching redesigns, others release minor iterative tweaks on a regular basis. YouTube is one...

Empathy. It’s a virtue. It’s a valuable quality in any human being. It’s a distinct advantage in connecting to people. It’s also kind of the latest design buzzword. But it’s not just a trend. You see, designers are figuring out that being able to empathize with and understand other people leads to creating better interfaces for them. If you know their needs, you can meet them. If you meet their needs, they’ll stick around longer....

Design thinking is the idea that we can solve problems by practicing human-centered design—putting people at the centre of the problem solving process. Core to the idea of design thinking is that we focus on an overall goal, rather than say a specific problem to solve. While it can help us solve some of the world’s most complex problems (think global warming), we can also use it every day in the web industry, to help us solve our own complex...

Many who don’t live in Vancouver at least know the western Canadian city for a few things: Sky-high housing prices, green sensibilities, and lots of rain. Now, thanks to local design and digital activists, they also know Vancouver for…producing a new city logo that has been blasted for being uninspiring. In an open letter published on Medium, local Vancouver art director, Brock Ellis, lambasted Robertson’s and the City Council’s...

We’ve all seen Comic Sans; the typeface that’s both loathed and (secretly) admired—some people have even dedicated a website to educating people about the very limited use cases of comic sans! It’s made a huge global impact in the decades since its original use-case, Microsoft’s Bob program. By 1996, it was popular enough to be preinstalled on every Macintosh computer that rolled off the assembly line, but how exactly did this...

Digital products will always need to be redesigned. Styles progress, hardware technologies advance, and development possibilities are ever-increasing. Just in the past year the potential for implementing microinteractions, and processor-intensive animations and graphics, has come along at a fair pace. Product teams are continuously looking to iterate and stay ahead of or pass the competition. This is ever important in furthering...

Nothing can ruin a design like typography that doesn’t fit. Whether it’s too big (or too small), improper type scaling is a major problem. It’s a problem for more designs than you might think. Too commonly you visit a website where the type renders beautifully on a desktop browser, only to revisit later from a phone and find it difficult to read. It happens all the time. The issue is that the type wasn’t truly scaled for each device. It’s...

WeTransfer is one of the mostly widely admired start-ups of the last decade. In many ways it embodies what we tell our clients to aspire to: a simple idea, solving a common problem, well executed. What really makes WeTransfer standout is the high-value it places on design; since its launch in 2009, WeTransfer has used design to add interest to what is typically a mundane process: transferring files from one computer to another. WeTransfer has...

When you design for the web, no matter the industry, there are expectations that must be met, and realities that must be accounted for. Although this is true for all forms of web design, it is especially true for logo design. This is something we’ve encountered numerous times. Think about the many different conventions of logo design. They’re usually placed in the top left-hand corner of the page, they are usually linked to the homepage,...

It seems like the current buzz word in the design industry and everyone wants one. But how exactly can a product benefit from having a living, breathing design language? I’m going to try break down the very basics so you can understand why it’s needed. Creating an underlying language will unite our design philosophies and methodologies across our platform. So why do we need a design language? There are two ways of looking at it, from an internal...